


the mystery trees

by sodiumflare



Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carré
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, F/F, Lesbian AU, Rule 63, as seems to be my shtick these days
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-31
Updated: 2016-01-31
Packaged: 2018-05-17 08:58:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5862808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sodiumflare/pseuds/sodiumflare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She meets Belinda in Prague and it's a risk but what isn't. They drink warm spiced wine in the streets where the air smells like soot, like snow. "Control would do a nutter if he knew," Jane laughs, a little drunk, a little reckless, a little in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the mystery trees

Later, Jane will remember: standing in the back of a pub, cradling a glass of something copper-colored and cheap, feet pinched slightly in not-yet broken in shoes, meeting then for the first time Belinda and her uncanny ability to find you and hold you across a crowded room.

\--

It's of some relief that her quarantine is in a girls' school. The Circus doesn't recruit from female institutions. Or rather they scarcely recruit females at all. Belinda rather recruited herself, scarcely out of public school and with the rare combination of brilliance, beauty and sheer nerviness that had caught Control's beady eye. And then Belinda had brought Jane with her: a comet with its tail.

Swanson, the headmistress, barely tolerates her but appreciates the cheap labor and is undoubtedly slightly blackmailed. There are things said about unmarried women of Jane's age, living alone and better on with dogs than horses; they certainly don't get hired to teach children. Jane contemplates tossing her office during chapel for the hell of it but doesn't. "Forget," they said, and she tries. Oh, she tries. Props up the caravan with bricks. Spreads salve on her shoulder. Buries the gun.

\--

The thing is: Jane is careful. She's seen networks go up like strings of fireworks, remembers Guillam coming back from Essaouira with bags under his eyes and a twitch under his lip. When she's blown she bleeds out on the cobblestones, watching with deadened detachment and tasting iron. So this is what it's like. So this is how it ends.

\--

When the War ends she kisses Belinda next to the sink in the ladies', skirt rucked up her hips and hands grasping for Bel's hair, for the wall, for the tap. Belinda kisses like a boy eating an apple, with a deliberateness that said means she means it, and also that she doesn't. Jane breaks first, gasping, tracing Belinda's backbone under her knuckles. "So what comes next?" she asks, and Belinda shrugs, careless lines under her sweater, says "Another war then, I guess."

In six months Jane's back in Sofia, Budapest, Bratislava. Building up her networks again, like planting vegetables, careful composition in careful lines and a long growing season. She meets Belinda in Prague and it's a risk but what isn't. They drink warm spiced wine in the streets where the air smells like soot, like snow. "Control would do a nutter if he knew," Jane laughs, a little drunk, a little reckless, a little in love.

"Fuck Control," Belinda says, wine on her lips, smile like a knife.

\--

She bleeds out but it doesn't end. They're very careful to keep her alive. She knows how these things work - she's trained recruits in it in the Nursery, she and Belinda.

In the end, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all.

\--

The thing was, Belinda used to say, that the food had been bad during the war but it hadn't _improved_ as it ought to have. Nothing, Jane sometimes thinks, has improved as it ought to have. It's still a war, isn't it, even if its mostly tucked away out of sight? But she remembers the endless terror of Berlin, of the time when noting the order of cars and whether the shades were down were not strange quirks but motions of survival. Her chest feels empty without the quiet terror of discovery but this is, she supposes, a time when emptiness is preferable to the thing that fills.

\--

Esterhas meets her on the tarmac, cigar clamped between his teeth and wearing one of his ridiculous ties. She's aware of the figure she cuts, slumped in her ill-fitting jacket, shoulder wrenched under her ear. One of Control's pets, sent home, broken. Pathetic. Esterhas doesn't let her see anyone. It's better that way, she supposes. Better to remember them as they were, and they her.

\--

"A mole," Control says, surveys her over his glasses. He looks something like an owl and she feels the tension siphon back into the emptiness in her chest. She thinks of Belinda, of spiced wine and cobblestones. So it is a war again. So Belinda was right.

\--

Later, Jane feels Belinda carefully rest her fingertips gently on the frets of her ribcage, breath steady and careful in the dark. This will be the last time.

**Author's Note:**

> That awkward moment when you've seen the movie three times, read the book once, and still couldn't describe the plot with any real accuracy but find yourself dearly in love with the characters. I don't know what's going on. You shouldn't worry if you don't, either, at least in this instance. 
> 
> Title from Mike Doughty's "Unsingable Name."


End file.
